Popular Sections

It’s nearly the end of May already, and we are getting ready for another month to get underway very soon with the currency markets. But before that happens we need to find out what will occur with the currency converter figures we see at the end of May.

Before we press ahead and do that, let’s see how the beginning of the last full week of May progressed in our last report. We certainly had a more promising start to the week as the pound had good results against three out of the five currencies. It dropped a small amount of 0.0013 against the US dollar and then 0.014 against the Hong Kong dollar.

But there was better news elsewhere. We added on two and a half cents against the Euro, and there were similar increases of this amount against both the New Zealand dollar and the Australian dollar as well. And all this occurred over a space of just two days.

So now we are going to look at how the results improved over the space of the final three days of that week. Would the British pound manage to keep ahead and add more good results to the ones we already achieved? Or would there be other results in store?

Let’s find out now by checking on the currency market results for those last three days of the week.

An overview of the currency markets for May 26th – May 28th 2010

Let’s start with the rate against the US dollar here, where we ended Tuesday evening on a lowly rate of 1.4345. Could we hope to improve on that at all or would we end up going back down nearer to the $1.40 mark?

There was good news to begin with as Wednesday came to a close, as the pound managed to tip over to 1.4401 by the time the day was over. The question was whether we could continue this good start, and indeed we managed to do just that.

On Thursday the exchange rate changed again, this time to 1.4481 at the end of the day. And luckily for us the good news kept coming in our direction as well, because we ended up finishing the week on 1.4570, which gave us something to celebrate for the week. It meant we were finishing on a rate that was two and a quarter cents higher than it had been on Tuesday night.

So with that piece of good news to begin with, let’s move on to see whether we could improve against the Euro as well. Here the starting rate left over from Tuesday night was 1.1736, so could we continue going up from here?

Well the pattern didn’t look the same against the Euro as it did against the US dollar, and by Wednesday night we had a figure of 1.1700. This was however replaced by a figure of 1.1816 the following day, so we achieved a good result then. But would we be able to keep achieving good results now until the end of the week?

The answer was no. On Friday night we slipped back to 1.1765, which meant that we had only added on a total of 0.0029. Better luck next week perhaps, as we finally slide into June.

Elsewhere with the Hong Kong dollar we were starting from a rate of 11.193. But things were looking better here as we increased that to 11.229 by Wednesday evening. And we continued the upward trend throughout the remainder of the week as well, achieving a rate of 11.277 on the 27th and closing out the week on 11.350 in the end.

This meant we had victory against the Hong Kong dollar, with an increase of 0.157 in total. It had certainly been a good end to the week here.

Finally we have the Aussie dollar and the New Zealand dollar to start with, so let’s begin with the latter of these two. The British pound had a starting rate of 2.1681 against the New Zealand dollar, but could we continue with the increases we had seen against this currency over the last few days?

It seemed as if we couldn’t because the next rate we had was 2.1435. We did better the day after by achieving a rate of 2.1568, but then we fell back again to 2.1371 on Friday evening. So here we achieved a loss of 0.031 in total.

Would we see a similar pattern in Australia then, or would we have something else to think about? We were starting from 1.7659 here, and just twenty four hours later that figure had changed to 1.7292. With such a big initial drop it seemed only likely that the pound would finish down for the week. It slowed the losses to 1.7276 on Thursday night before finishing on 1.7099 on Friday. This equated to a loss of over five and a half cents in all, so it wasn’t the best end to the week for the pound.

Notable events in the world of currency

Hong Kong dollar dips against Aussie dollar

Here the exchange rate fell from 0.1577 on Tuesday night to 0.1506 on Friday night, so it wasn’t the best performance by the Hong Kong dollar.

Big dip for the Euro against the Aussie dollar

We saw a fall from 1.5047 to 1.4534 for the Euro here, leaving a loss of over five cents trailing in its wake.

A fall for the Canadian dollar as well

The Aussie dollar was clearly strong last week as we saw the Canadian dollar drop from 1.1395 to 1.1219 over the course of the week.

So it was a mixed end to the week for the British pound really. The latest story about the renminbi currency for China was issued by FT.com on Friday, at this link. You may need to register for free to read it.

So you see it wasn’t just the pound that was experiencing problems. In other places currency issues can be a lot more profound. We’ll see you next time with a report on the beginning of June’s exchange rates.